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Go woke, go broke

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The 'uber-woke' Baldur's Gate III has sold more than 2.5 million units on PC, has 700,000 concurrent players at peak times, and it hasn't even released on consoles yet, though it is the current champ for Playstation pre-orders.

The regressive right has had a lot to say about the game. They hated the romancing of a druid shapechanged into a bear, thinking that it was promoting bear ******* instead of being damn funny as was intended. They hate that bisexual male romance options will hit on your male character (they call it 'immersion breaking'). They hate that the female characters aren't all super over the top exaggerations of game beauties (even though there are plenty of those too) when the ones that they're complaining about are both scared warriors, one of which is part demon and machine and the other is basically an alien from the stars. They REALLY truly hate that you can make your character basically anywhere from the LBGTQ community. Making a lesbian they might be able to accept, but picking your pronouns so you can be an NB? Being able to be transgender! Heavens forefend!

Anyway, it looks like it's going to be massively popular and make a ton of money. That broke woke bear ****** money.
 
I just learned that one of the ironies of the anti-woke rejection of Bud Lite is that, of course, its original mascot, Spuds McKenzie, was a gender bender. What's a poor old heman to do? Go home and put on a rerun of Lassie, I guess.
 
Are you all just trying to do "deliberate misunderstanding"?

Is Baldur's Gate marketing trying to pretend it is "woke" and "ultra-progressive" or does it have just standard marketing with options some don't like? So far it looks like you all are pretty busy setting up straw men for burning...
 
Klimax said:
Are you all just trying to do "deliberate misunderstanding"?

Is Baldur's Gate marketing trying to pretend it is "woke" and "ultra-progressive" or does it have just standard marketing with options some don't like? So far it looks like you all are pretty busy setting up straw men for burning...
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I don't think a product has to be marketed as 'woke' to be, or to be perceived as, 'woke'.

If Baldur's Gate has produced outrage from the anti-woke crowd (and if the description of it above is accurate I can see why it would), and if its sales have been unaffected by that outrage, it's an example of a product which contradicts the title of this thread.
 
Pixel42 said:
I don't think a product has to be marketed as 'woke' to be, or to be perceived as, 'woke'.

If Baldur's Gate has produced outrage from the anti-woke crowd (and if the description of it above is accurate I can see why it would), and if its sales have been unaffected by that outrage, it's an example of a product which contradicts the title of this thread.
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Well, it has romance options outside of the standard male-female, so I guess it will outrage some.

Personally I dislike romance options in RPGs, if I wanted to play a dating simulator I'd buy that, and I hate it when a fully geared and vital party member suddenly leaves because you upset them romantically somehow.
Alignment conflicts, yeah, but romance just annoys me, but not enough not to buy the game.
 
dann said:
I hadn't heard that story, and it's not even a new one: Bud Light just revived its most controversial mascot of all times (BusinessInsider, Feb 6, 2017)
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Even the marketing content is trapped in the doom spiral of endless nostalgia and reboots. Western Civilization has truly fallen :eek:

Jokes aside, probably not a bad move considering the aging demographic for American Light Lager. Reliving the culture of their youth must feel like sliding into a warm bath.
 
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d4m10n said:
Neither the game that is woke nor the game boycotted by wokes went broke.

It's almost like gamers have other priorities.
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It's almost like it's a false equivalency that fails even on a direct comparison. Baldur's Gate 3 is doing ten times the numbers it was expected to.

It is the game itself that is accused of being woke as opposed to the other game where it was the author of the books who is not.

Pixel42 said:
I don't think a product has to be marketed as 'woke' to be, or to be perceived as, 'woke'.

If Baldur's Gate has produced outrage from the anti-woke crowd (and if the description of it above is accurate I can see why it would), and if its sales have been unaffected by that outrage, it's an example of a product which contradicts the title of this thread.
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The character creator allows you to pick your 'presentation', which are the pronouns, as man, woman, neither, or other iirc. There are four main bodies for most races, two masc and two fem. Then you can choose your genitals (if you have nudity enabled) and those can be any regardless of your choices of the other two choices (except maybe for Dragonborn, not being mammals and all).

It hasn't been marketed as 'woke' as far as I know, but then again it's had a very small* marketing budget. It is a property licensed from Hasbo, but the studio self-published it, and is a relatively small studio. It's 30% owned by Tencent (Chinese megagame conglomerate) but was not otherwise connected or supported by them. The owners are the founder and his wife. The Potter game had much, much more marketing.

As you point out, that really isn't a valid metric anyway. It has been accused of being 'woke' throughout its development, and the final options have only made that worse. Some that accused it of that are doing the same thing they did with the Mario movie and trying to claim it wasn't really woke, which is why it is doing so unexpectedly well.

EDIT: *small relative to most AAA releases of course, and especially compared to Potter.
 
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tyr_13 said:
It is the game itself that is accused of being woke as opposed to the other game where it was the author of the books who is not.
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Accused by whom? I haven't seen any rageposts on BG3 from the usual suspects.

Sent from my SM-G996U using Tapatalk
 
The Conflicting Data Points of Dylan Mulvaney and Barbara Millicent Roberts

Excellent blogpost comparing the attempted cancellations of Barbie and Bud Light:
https://mikepesca.substack.com/p/barbenbudlight

So how does Barbie, the billion-dollar grossing Greta Gerwig film do anything other than totally rebut the go woke and go broke (GWGB) thesis? The record-setting movie is, axiomatically, extremely popular with the masses even as it calls out the patriarchy, matter-of-factly features a trans actresses as a Barbie, decries corporatism, upholds allyship, lampoons toxic masculinity, and features Lawyer Barbie opining in court that combining logic and emotions doesn’t diminish her powers but rather expands them.​

Mike explains several of the factors which made one boycott relatively effective while the other appeared to make no impression.
 
Kinda seems like that these "boycotts" are very rarely even honest attempts of boycotts, at least in any conventional understanding on how boycotts work, but basically content farming for media pundits and whatnot.

A real boycott involves some level of community organizing. Right wing pundits freaking out about Barbie or individual Twitch streamers deciding not to play the TERF game isn't a boycott. Absent an honest to god, organized effort to actually boycott a product, it's just virtue signaling. It's basically just another way for public figures to riff on the topical news of the week. I'm sure some people didn't buy the TERF game in part based on distaste for Rowling, but individual consumers avoiding products they don't like isn't a boycott, that's just ordinary consumer behavior.

I'm dubious about generic consumer boycotts in general. They are almost never effective, long lasting, or organized in any serious way. The united states especially seems to lack the community organization necessary to even have an effective boycott. Individuals don't declare boycott.
 
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Well, ...
With the lonely support of only one ally, Israel, Washington has insisted on continuing six decades of crippling boycott on trade with Cuba despite overwhelming condemnation of it in the UN for the past 19 years.
Younger Castro steers Cuba to a new revolution (Independent, Feb 12, 2012)
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The US blockade has been devastating, and the list of countries that the USA doesn't mind trading with makes the hypocrisy obvious. But it also isn't a mere consumer boycott, obviously. (And Kennedy made sure to stock up on Cuban cigars before it was declared. In his case, enough of them to last a lifetime, I assume ...)
 
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Conservatives are trying to come to terms with Barbie having passed $1bn and southern states preferring Barbie over Oppenheimer:
Some conservatives have surprising 'Barbie' take despite criticisms of liberal agenda (Fox, Aug 7, 2023)

Right-wingers, including Fox News hosts, are forced to change their tune over Barbie argument after the movie's wild success across the nation. John Iadarola and Francesca Fiorentini break it down on The Damage Report.
Right-Wingers Abandon Insane Barbie Movie Attack As Logic BACKFIRES (The Damage Report on YouTube, Aug 13, 2023)
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d4m10n said:
Accused by whom? I haven't seen any rageposts on BG3 from the usual suspects.

Sent from my SM-G996U using Tapatalk
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Who are your 'usual suspects'? I've seen more than a few including the Daily Mail article titled 'BALDUR'S GATE gone WOKE?'

EDIT: What the heck, the Daily Mail article is gone. It was written by Peter Hoskin and I saw it was updated 04 Aug but even knowing all that it isn't showing up on searches. Now there are glowing reviews from the same author.
 
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